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Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Where Local Governments Are Paying the Bills With Police Fines

It is happening of course. However it is a self limiting and inefficient way to raise funding, not least because it reallocates police resources into fine friendly activities. Some of that can be handled but too much and you have another problem. A radar trap on Sunday morning works but not do well midnight Saturday. Fine production should never be the objective.

This pretty well establishes who out there is operating this form of abuse.

Inasmuch as the practice is naturally uneven, it is naturally unfair as well. However it will take a federal initiative to shut nonsense like this down. Perhaps at the same time we end prison slavery. The wrong people have been gaming our system and laws for decades and it demands federal standards to end it.

The dependence of thousands of
American cities and towns on judicial fines and forfeiture to fund
public services is unhealthy for democracy. Public awareness of the
depth of the problem has been growing since the Department of Justice's 2014 investigation into the Ferguson, Mo., police, following the shooting of Michael Brown.

According to a Sunlight examination
of 2013 Census data, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois and
Mississippi topped the list of states where city governments relied
heavily on fines and forfeits for funding. We concluded this by
examining the ratio of local fines and forfeits to local tax in order to
see where local governments rely particularly heavily on fines and
forfeits to pay for basic services. Using this metric, the government of
Henderson, Louisiana relied most on these types of fines and forfeits.
Henderson collected $3.73 in fines and forfeits for every $1 it
collected in taxes. Out of the five municipal governments which reported
collecting more money from fines than from taxes in 2013, three
(Henderson, Pollack, and Olla) were from Louisiana. All five were towns
with populations under 1,500. This suggests that most of those fines
were probably paid by people who did not live in those towns, but who
nonetheless had to drive through them.

The Louisiana towns were unusual
relative to the rest of the local governments sampled by the Census. The
median ratio of fines and forfeit revenue to tax revenue for city and
county governments was 0.02 -- that is, the median city or county
collected two cents in fines and forfeits for every dollar it collected
in taxes. Averaging local governments by state revealed that high
relative collection of fines and forfeits is more common in some states
than others. The following table displays the ten states with local
governments demonstrating the highest fines-to-tax ratio.

State

Average Fines/Index

Louisiana

.19

Arkansas

.10

Georgia

.09

Illinois

.08

Mississippi

.08

Missouri

.07

Delaware

.07

Kansas

.05

Arizona

.05

Table describing the average of fines divided by total tax for 10
states where this ratio is the highest. (Table credit: Sunlight
Foundation)

How to Use Tax and Census Data to Reveal the Story

How did we figure this out? Knowing
how much a given city depends on criminal and civil fines is difficult
because it's hard to get detailed information. In our collaboration with MuckRock
last November, we received no information from our public records
requests for detailed data on the kind and amount of fines levied by a
sample of cities. Frankly, it's challenging to even get aggregate information on fines issued by local law enforcement and local courts.

Meanwhile, even when individual
departments do provide information, it can be hard to know whether it
represents high, low, or average collection of fines and forfeits. There
are so many local governments, and so few places where their data is
aggregated, that it's hard to find a significant collection of useful
data in order to make comparative observations about any one place.

Nonetheless, local government data is aggregated under certain programs. In recentposts,
we examined the local government data that has been aggregated through
the Uniform Criminal Reporting (UCR) program. To learn more about local
fines, though, we need different data sources.

While far from complete, there are a
couple of meaningful, publicly-accessible collection points for local
government finance data. We can begin by looking at two major sources of
financial data for local governments: the annual US Census survey of state and local government finance and the Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) database of the Municipal Securities Rule Board (MSRB).

The most recent US Census data on local government finance is for 2013. The survey collects information
on "revenue, expenditure, debt, and assets (cash and security
holdings)" for all states and a representative sample of local
governments. To see information at the level of individual local
governments, you must download, unzip and format the public-use
individual unit file. Each line of data contains an ID number for each
place, a code for each category of revenue and expenditure, and an
amount of money collected or expended.

Code U30 identifies the total amount
of "revenue from penalties imposed for violations of law; civil
penalties (e.g., for violating court orders); court fees if levied upon
conviction of a crime or violation; court-ordered restitutions to crime
victims where government actually collects the monies; and forfeits of
deposits held for performance guarantees or against loss or damage (such
as forfeited bail and collateral)." The category does not include
penalties for late tax payment, library fines, or sale of confiscated
property.

Since individual lines may be inaccurate, it is best to use the database for looking at trends and averages.

First, we can use information about
local population together with the fines and forfeits total in order to
see where fines and forfeits are likely to play a particularly
significant financial role. We can note, for example, that there is
significant state-level variation in the average amount of fines and
forfeits that local governments collect, per capita. The states where
local governments assess, on average, the most fines and forfeits per
capita do so at a rate that's four times higher than the states doing it
the least. Cities typically collect more fines and forfeits per capita
than counties do -- although the opposite is true in a handful of
states, most notably Kansas and Nevada.

It would be useful to be able to be
able to compare local governments on the proportion of their total
revenue that comes from fines and forfeits, but the Census data was
insufficiently exhaustive to provide this measure consistently. Instead,
we can look at how a local government's collection of fines and
forfeits compares to its collection of taxes. The Census provides data
on all of the varieties of tax that local governments collect, from the
very common property and sales tax to more obscure ones, like taxes on
airports. Our extract of Census data containing the 2013 information on
tax and fine revenue from all sampled city or county governments that
reported revenue from both taxes and fines is available for download here.

With the substantial amount of
information it collects together, the U.S. Census provides an
unparalleled data source for understanding the broader picture for local
government finances. To get into the specifics of any one location,
however, we need primary sources. Happily, the "fines and forfeits"
category is not just a Census category. It is also a common category for
local government budgets, typically available on all local government
websites.

Disclosure of revenue collection
through fines and forfeits can also be found in the Comprehensive Annual
Financial Reports (CAFR) that local governments provide as an aspect of
their financial disclosures for the issuance of municipal bonds, which
means that this information can also be found on the MSRB's EMMA database.
Find individual local governments by choosing a state, then a
bond-issuing local government, and then select "Financial Disclosures"
to find that government's CAFR history. While we can only look at CAFRs
individually, the EMMA repository is a useful tool for supporting
comparisons of governments regionally, or over time.

Neither the Census nor the MSRB
offers an unproblematic answer to the question of where to get
information about these issues. The survey of state and local finances
is sometimes inaccurate, a possibility the Census acknowledges in a
disclaimer.

For example, the 2013 US Census
survey shows Boulder, Colo., reporting zero revenue from fines and
forfeits, when the city's budget documentation shows otherwise.
The MSRB provides PDFs of individual government budget documents, but
no machine readable data. Nonetheless, both data sources provide
critical and comparable information about governmental dependence on
fines and forfeits.

Cash Cow Police Departments Are Abnormal

What existing data tells us is that
it is not normal for governments to raise significant revenue through
their policing activities. Across Florida, for example, fines and
forfeitures represented an average of 1%
of cities' revenue between 1995 and 2009. In economically healthy
cities, although the absolute dollar total of city-issued fines and
forfeitures can be large, it still represents a small proportion of city
revenue. Washington, D.C.
currently raises about 1.7% of its total revenue through fines and
forfeitures (and it appears that over 70% of the fines and forfeitures
total comes from speed cameras, which produced $85 million in city revenue during FY 2015.) San Francisco and New York City both raise about 1.1% of their total revenues through fines and forfeitures.

There is also evidence, however, that
this changes when cities come under financial pressure, and that local
governments collect more fines when other forms of city revenue decline.
One study,
examining North Carolina's response to the early-2000s recession,
showed that increased ticketing by local police made up 38% of the
annual decline in city revenue.

This was a more frequent situation for local governments after the 2007 recession produced a serious decline
in municipal property tax revenue. Cities have expanded their use of
some kinds of revenue-generating law enforcement practices, like
red-light cameras and speed cameras [cite].

Individual cases show how economic
pressure leads to an interest in finding ways that police can generate
additional municipal revenue. Between 2007 and 2013, failing local
revenue forced the police department of West Covina, Calif., to cut 37% of its staff. The city's 2014 budget
noted that as a result, "understaffing is both a public safety and
customer service issue, as residents have to wait longer for responses
to non-emergency calls, and supervisory span of control has been
reduced." The California-based Drug Policy Alliance studied revenues
for West Covina, among other California towns, and found a strong relationship between local budget pressure and increased police collection of civil forfeiture money:

In West Covina forfeiture
income surged in the wake of budget cuts to the police department. After
growing for several consecutive years, general fund appropriations for
West Covina's police budget were cut by over $1 million in FY 2011. The
following year, the department's forfeiture take more than quadrupled.
In fiscal years 2011, 2012 and 2013, the police budget was cut a
combined $1,677,134. In that same period, the department received
$5,529,409 from DOJ equitable sharing, more than making up for the
budget cuts. The amount of DOJ forfeiture revenue police collected in
those 3 years as budget appropriations were shrinking was more than 7
times greater than what the department collected from forfeitures in the
8 preceding years, a time when police budgets were growing.

In 2010, a commander in the West Covina police department wrote in Police Chief magazine about
ideas from "a group of experts" for new ways to generate revenue,
including through increasing all fines by 50 percent. He described two
new "ordinances and programs" the department had implemented to generate
new revenue: a new fine for party noise running up to $500 and a $1,000
fine on parents for juvenile graffiti.

Ferguson's reliance on fines for revenue, during a period of regional financial stress, resulted in the city collecting 80% more fines between 2011 and 2013, by which point it was raising 20% of its budget through fines and forfeitures. Before the killing of Michael Brown, they anticipated that they would collect an extra million dollars in 2014 through police activity, raising a total of 25% of the city budget through fines.

Cities and their police departments
may see increasing their dependence fines as a viable strategy for
funding the government. However, the cost of running a revenue
generation scheme through the criminal justice system is that things can
very quickly get bad
for the people who are required to pay for it. Municipalities can
compound the financial hazard for the people who are fined by contracting with private probation collectors, who are allowed to add additional, legally-enforceable fees and interest to the amount that the court originally required.

To get details about how
revenue-raising policing is working specifically, we need reporters to
continue to dig into details and governments to respond to public
records requests. Transparency and accountability must go together. In
the meantime, the rest of us do have some public data sources which we
can use to begin to answer the question.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may
not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the
source.

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Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.